Stories

MATH/CSCI Double Major Gives Award Winning Talk

Erika Sweet, a mathematics/computer science double major, gave a talk at the MAA MathFest 2017 in Denver discussing her research with Tracy Ruscetti, Christelle Sabatier, and David McMillan of the Biology department. She won an award for one of the best student talks. The talk was entitled “4C Coding in STEM – Identifying Obstacles to Clear Scientific Writing by Analyzing Factors that Impact Students’ Quantitative Writing Ability”. Enjoy the abstract:

Our research looks at writing as a way to communicate quantitative information. We have developed an algorithm to transform quantitative comparison statements into a matrix of boolean presence/absence features. We can then interrogate these matrices to test hypothesis about the relationship between student writing ability and factors such as academic performance, assignment complexity, demographic information and conceptual knowledge.